Why do we link an azure storage account to a cloud service? How does it help? What happens if I do not link them?
Two reasons:
Easier management - you have better idea of what is your overall configuration for a particular deployment
Easier management - upon deleting a resource you are being asked whether you want to delete the linked resources also
By the way, you can also link a Windows Azure SQL Database to a Cloud Service.
The whole idea is to help you better manage the services. There is no other reason and nothing will happen if you do not link. But think a bit - if you manage 3 subscriptions, 2 cloud services deployments each, 2 storage accounts per deployment. That is 6 cloud services, 12 storage accounts. Can you easily tell which service is using which account?
The cloud service depends on the storage account. When deploying the cloud service it will create a container called vsdeploy with a block blob that is used for the VMs it creates.
It also stores crash dump files there as well under the container wad-crashdumps. The folder structure is WAD{GUID}{worker role}{instance}. Then it will store all the .dmp files as block blobs.
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Could someone please tell some examples where we can use Azure file share in azure instead of Azure Blobs. In the internet whenever I search I get it can be mounted or it follows SMB protocol. But still I am not understanding a single case where we can use Azure File share.
For this I tried to look into When to use Azure blob storage versus Azure file share?
-This is a similar question but doesn't answer my question.
Azure provides a variety of storage tools and services, including Azure Storage. To determine which Azure technology is best suited for your scenario, see Review your storage options in the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework.
For detailed information and examples refer to this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-introduction
It depends mostly on your use-case and how you plan to access the data. If you simply want to mount and access your files Azure Files will be your best fit. If you are looking for the lowest cost and want to access your data programmatically through your application Azure Blob would be a better fit. Both are accessible through the portal or Azure Storage Explorer.
I also recommend this Learn module which covers the difference in data types and solutions.
Additional information: Azure Blob Storage vs Azure File Storage
Cost details of Azure Blob Storage pricing & Azure Files pricing
In short: if you ...
have an application that needs to store or access files in the cloud, use Blob Storage
need a file share that can be used by, for instance, a server, use File Shares
Azure Files shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. Azure Files shares can also be cached on Windows Servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.
This means a File Share is, somewhat simplified, similar to a network share you would have in a local environment.
Azure Blob Storage helps you create data lakes for your analytics needs, and provides storage to build powerful cloud-native and mobile apps. Optimize costs with tiered storage for your long-term data, and flexibly scale up for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads.
This means Blob Storage is what you need when you're building powerful cloud-native and mobile apps.
I have 3 applications deployed to Azure Service Fabric via ARM template. The only items that have been identified as needing to be backed up are some resources. They include a central blob storage, about 5 SQL databases, and the key vault. The cluster and apps can be redeployed right away via the template.
Searching for backup solutions, I'm seeing a lot of info on backups for services, but not for specific resources like I have here. Can anyone point me to the right direction/sample code on how to do this or is it even an option?
Ok so, storage cannot be backed up using Azure services. You have to créate a program\script that will do that for you.
For the keyvault you can use this powershell cmdlet.
For the SQL there are a bunch of ways to do that, but perhaps you can settle with the built-in backup, which happens automatically and goes 7-35 days back (depending on your tier)
I deployed WorkerRole to Azure Cloud Service (classic) in new portal. With this, I also created Azure Storage account for queue.
Try to add AutoScale rule, the storage account is not listed. Tried to select Other Resource and put Resource Identifier of storage, there's no Metric name listed.
Is it by design that classic Cloud Service and new Storage account not working together?
Storage account data (e.g. blobs, queues, containers, tables) are accessible simply with account name + key. Any app can work with them.
However, to manage/enumerate available storage accounts, there are Classic-created and ARM-created accounts, each with different API's.
The original Azure Service Management (ASM) API doesn't know anything about ARM resources. There's a fairly good chance that, since you're deploying to a Classic cloud service, it's using ASM only and will not be able to enumerate ARM-created storage accounts.
If you create a Classic storage account (which has zero difference in functionality), you should be able to see it as an option for auto-scale.
I have a bit more details on the differences in this answer.
At this time, it is not possible to autoscale anything based on a new "v2" storage account. It has nothing to do with the fact that you are using the classic Azure Cloud Service. I am having the same issue with using Azure App Services. In the end, I just created a classic storage account to use for the autoscaling. There is no difference in how you interact with the different types of storage accounts.
I want to create a couple of cloud services - Int, QA, and Prod. Each of these will connect to separate Db's.
Do these cloud services require "storage accounts"? Conceptually the cloud services have executables and they must be physically located somewhere.
Note: I do not use any blobs/queues/tables.
If so, must I create 3 separate storage accounts or link them up to one?
Storage accounts are more like storage namespaces - it has a url and a set of access keys. You can use storage from anywhere, whether from the cloud or not, from one cloud service or many.
As #sharptooth pointed out, you need storage for diagnostics with Cloud Services. Also for attached disks (Azure Drives for cloud services), deployments themselves (storing the cloud service package and configuration).
Storage accounts are free: That is, create a bunch, and still only pay for consumption.
There are some objective reasons why you'd go with separate storage accounts:
You feel that you could exceed the 20,000 transaction/second advertised limit of a single storage account (remember that storage diagnostics are using some of this transaction rate, which is impacted by your logging-aggressiveness).
You are concerned about security/isolation. You may want your dev and QA folks using an entirely different subscription altogether, with their own storage accounts, to avoid any risk of damaging a production deployment
You feel that you'll exceed 200TB 500TB (the limit of a single storage account)
Azure Diagnostics uses Azure Table Storage under the hood (and it's more convenient to use one storage account for every service, but it's not required). Other dependencies your service has might also use some of the Azure Storage services. If you're sure that you don't need Azure Storage (and so you don't need persistent storage of data dumped through Azure Diagnostics) - okay, you can go without it.
The service package of your service will be stored and managed by Azure infrastructure - that part doesn't require a storage account.
I'm trying to get up-and-going with Windows Azure. I understand that I need to create a "Storage Account". However, what I'm confused about is, how I should set it up. For instance, my Azure subscription is set to my company name. I intend to have multiple ASP.NET web applications (web roles) associated with my subscription. Each web application will have its own database.
My question is, should each web application have its own storage account? Or should only one storage account be used for all of my projects?
Thank you!
There's no one way to answer this, but here are some thoughts to help your decision:
Each storage account is limited to 100TB. If you feel that you will push the limits of this across multiple websites, then create multiple storage accounts for sure.
To make billing easier, I'd suggest separate storage accounts
Storage accounts have an SLA of a few thousand transactions per second across the entire storage account. For performance purposes, it's probably better to have separate storage accounts
Consider putting your diagnostic data in a separate storage account. This way, you can safely give your Storage Account key to a 3rd-party like ParaLeap (creators of AzureWatch) for monitoring your app, while not giving away the key to real customer data, for instance.
If you need more than 5 storage accounts, you'll need to contact Customer Support to increase this number.
Windows Azure Storage server is for simple blob storage. This is for when your app needs a file store. Any application, not just Azure web roles, can target a storage service. It's kind of like Amazon S3 if you're familiar with that.
Storage services are not required to run Azure applications. You just need a "compute" instance.